Monday, 26 November 2012

Femininity and the call...

I began this post the day after I read about the trouble with women bishops
in the Church of England but, like so much else recently, you lose your place,
you make a mistake, a sentence doesn't quite make sense and you're flooded with
feelings of hopelessness, and you just give up. But I decided to return to the
matter after a conversation with arguably the only decent man at work on Friday
morning. It was asked: ''when did women cease to be feminine?'' Eventually I
said ''…which is why I don't like lesbians,'' to which my friend said ''you
really are an oddball, Patrick!'' and laughed. I can't say I blame him. Now, my
relationship to the fairer sex is complicated by my own ''problem,'' with that
and with domineering women (like my mother); nevertheless I like women and like
the society of women. But I can't understand sexual attraction to women, even
less sexual attraction among women. Even more confusing is that lesbians
generally dislike men, and yet many (if not most) look like men (more than me!)
and are attracted to other women who look like men! But the question is
apposite all the same and is not solely restricted to ''butch'' women. You
don't have to cut your hair short, grow out your body hair, put on weight and
wear boots to be considered an inferior woman by me. I can think of a number of
women who like to dress up, wear their seven inch heels out and instigate
drunken brawls with some unlucky sod. Femininity has little (if anything) to do
with how much foundation you paint onto your face. Femininity is an innate
quality and means rather a woman's deportment, how she carries herself, her
dignity, her grace, her gentleness, the things she finds amusing. Unfortunately
this concept is maligned these days and you're considered a weirdo by some for
thinking of it, a misogynist by others; feminists accuse me of trying to
pigeon-hole women into one particular ''idea'' of womanhood - at the kitchen
sink, for example. I'm sure you'd agree that a drunken woman in a revealing
dress shouting abuse at someone in a night club is just a man in drag. What
difference is there between her and a football hooligan? None whatsoever. But I
do think that a truly feminine woman, someone like Darcey Bussell or Audrey
Hepburn, is so wonderful. I'm sorry but put Darcey Bussell next to the man in
drag shouting abuse and the difference is startling; akin to the difference
between Michelangelo's Pieta and Tracey Emin's Bed.

Now, where were we? Ah yes,
disparaging butch women. This is not a treatise on how or why the differences
between men and women are breaking down any more than a call from me to try and
change anything - you would only be wasting your time. Time. Jacob Bronowski
once said that the arrow of Time points always in the direction of diminishing
difference. Time was when there was a clear difference between the sexes; now,
thanks to a society built on secular principles, there's almost none. Lord only
knows to what uneasy, unnatural future we are all bound. So where does this
cultural and gender revolution leave the young woman with aspirations to join
the priesthood? What shall we say of her femininity?

I am not convinced of theological
arguments against the ordination of women (although I would be interested to
read any theological argument in their favour); I think they are reactionary
constructs and just a tad misogynistic. Rome, of course, cites its own
authority in the battle; “we can no more ordain a woman than we can govern the
tides!” – a rather unconvincing argument, I daresay, since Rome’s authority fluctuates
depending on the incumbent of the Holy See. No institution, be it as old as the
hills, is sacred in the Roman church (except the papacy)! However I would look
to the ecclesiastical polity handed down to us from the Fathers as the norm and
standard of contemporary church governance and hierarchy. If it is not the case
in the fifth century, why should it be so now? The ordination of women may not
be a purely theological matter but it is fundamental nonetheless and goes to
the heart of our understanding of the Church. The very notion of a ''priestess,''
let alone a ''bishopess,'' would have been abhorrent to the Fathers, and I
would say more for scriptural than cultural reasons. The ordination of women
comes in the wake of a very recent history of women's rights campaigning and,
to me at any rate, just seems to be a rub off from all that. This alone renders
the “desire” rather dubious. How far back, then, does the “desire” among women to
be the “equal” of men in ecclesiastical matters go? Whence came it? Do young
girls really go up to their mothers and say: “mummy, when I grow up I want to
be a bishop?” Of course, that’s not entirely how it happens and priestly or
episcopal vocations are different from that of, say, a gymnast or a ballerina.
The difficulty I find with priestesses nowadays, more than in the days when I
was blindly obedient to Roman authority on the question, is that I do not think
that a vocation to the priesthood is a feminine
pursuit, nor am I convinced of the reality of the vocation among priestesses.
This is, of course, not the end of the matter and it is merely the result of my
own subjective thought. I am not a theologian; I can merely articulate what I feel in conscience to be a truth
begotten of the unwritten natural law and the constant Tradition of the Church.
I can say with total confidence that my belief in God is founded on the same
principle.

Of course, my trouble is my
inability to put forward an argument about anything without sounding like a
bigot, and often my argument is marred by some sudden stroke. Let me say now
that I do not think that women are less capable of piety and ministry than men
and contrary to what I may have implied earlier I do not equate a “priestly vocation” in a woman with any kind of homosexual
tendencies nor with unlawful, antisocial behaviour. I simply think that
religious women who feel called in this way ought to channel their gifts and
their pious notions in such a way as to be more in line with the ecclesiastical
polity long established. I’m sure they have much to offer. What to do with
priestesses already in existence is another matter.

This is the first post in quite a
while at which I actually had to sit down and think so comments would be
welcome!